Braille is a very important communication code for people worldwide with low vision and blindness. For some years, there has been an increasing trend to use computers for entering, editing, and printing new Braille documents using special purpose software and printers. However, there are a large number of old Braille documents starting to wear out which need to be reproduced so that they can be preserved and accessed by more people. Since manual transcription is tedious and costly, there is a need for a system to duplicate Braille documents.
One of the current methods to reproduce Braille documents is to use a piece of thermal-sensitive material and melt the material on the document to be reproduced using, for example, a Braille Thermoform Machine having a heater. It is useful for making a limited number of copies of Braille documents. The way it functions is by placing a Braille document (e.g., paper embossed with Braille markings) on a flat surface on the machine. Then, a blank plastic page is placed on top of the Braille document. Both pages are held in place by a frame, which is lowered over the edges of the platform. After that, a heating unit is pulled over the material and held there for three to five seconds. At the end of this time, a vacuum device sucks the softened plastic page down over the Braille dots, so that the plastic is molded into a pattern identical to the page underneath the plastic. To do another copy, the whole process has to be repeated. While this method produces an accurate replica of the original document, it is very primitive, generates a single copy at a time, produces a bad smell, cannot be used for double-side Braille paper, cannot be used if the current Braille document is plastic, and the quality and resolution of the Braille dots of the original document are degraded as a result of the process.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described herein above.